Figure Thumbnail

Overview

The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) is a wide-ranging modernization program targeted at transforming the way the National Airspace System (NAS) is managed, thereby increasing the capacity of the system to meet the growing demand. A key aspect of NextGen is the transition to a net-centric model for transferring information of all types (Figure 1). This has strong parallels with the DoD’s Global Information Grid (GIG), and in fact, many of the system usage scenarios require a significant level of data sharing between the DoD, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and numerous other agencies.

Evolution of the FAA systems to a state where information can be shared efficiently among all parts of the FAA and the broader aviation community will take a massive effort in upgrading the software and communication architecture in use today. Lincoln is prototyping the NextGen Architecture to prove viability of different designs.

The aviation-specific Corridor Integrated Weather System (CIWS) reengineering effort will utilize network-enabled methodologies, common coding and documentation standards, and other components of modern software design and data dissemination.